LG Optimus 2X With Tegra 2 Review

23.04.2011

When the world was in desperate need of a dual-core smartphone, the only ones that were there to help where LG and NVIDIA. Let me tell you that the first smartphone with a dual-core processor, was launched in early February 2011, and is called the Optimus 2X.

Keep in ming that in 2010, LG delivered two great devices which are the Optimus S and T, but they were mid range smartphones so Samsung, HTC and Motorola are those who remained to fight for the Android supremacy.

LG Optimus 2X Hardware

Unfortunately, there are not big differences between the current Optimus 2X and the one that we saw a couple of months ago, codenamed Star. One piece of glass covers the front, interrupted only by the earpiece grille from the top.

You will also find four touch buttons and a front-facing camera next to the LG logo. As we said before this is a simple but nice design, but maybe LG concentrated and spend their money on what’s underneath the hood.

The nice black back cover has a silver column through the middle of the ‘with Google’ slogan, which ends with a bump near the top, specially created to host the 8-megapixel camera, which has a protective cover to ‘hide’ the camera.

Overall, the Optimus 2X works and feels great. Although the materials lacks of quality, the final product with all put together looks absolutely astonishing. They have placed a heavy emphasis on details, because even the power / lock button ( the only physical button on the Optimus ) feels great.

LG Optimus 2X Tegra 2

Piece de resistance inside the Optimus 2X is of course, NVIDIA’s Tegra 2. It’s running on two 1GHz Cortex-A9 CPU cores and eight GeForce GPU cores, and also plenty of room to integrate an HDMI and dual display support. So this means that you can watch a movie on your Optimus 2X and your HDTV at the same time.

The dual display functionality is absolutely astonishing, especially when you browse or look at pictures, but also when you play built-in games such as Shrek Kart, which transform the 2X into a great controller for gaming.

The HDMI cable included is absolutely great for use with 1080p video content, which looks nice and plays without lag on the Optimus. To establish the HDMI connection won’t take more than 5 seconds, and the playback switches between the TV and Optimus instantaneous. If you remove the HDTV cable while the playback, it will automatically switch to the Optimus 2X and its speaker. Connect it back again and in a second it’s on your HDTV.

LG Optimus 2X Display

Let me tell you that LG’s Optimus 2X sports a 4-inch WVGA supporting 800 x 480 resolution, nothing unusual, right? Well, let me tell you that Optimus’ display is not an ordinary one, because it’s brighter and very good saturated. The bad news is that it still doesn’t matches the displays on Apple’s iPhone 4 or Sharp’s IS03.

Unfortunately, the smartphone that we worked on had a little defect that allowed some backlight ‘escape’ at the top, but we do not thing that the retail versions will experience this kind of issues, so we will forget about it and wait for another accusation.

LG Optimus Software

The most important thing is that apps load much more faster than on other Android smartphones, but the bad news is that navigation and the Optimus’ menus didn’t feel as fast as we hoped. Unfortunately, it seems that the final code wasn’t optimized very good. For example we found a bug, the gallery app crashed every time we exit it using the black button after entering it through the Clock application.

We also installed Advanced Task Killer on the Optimus and although we stopped all background running apps, the highest amount of memory freed was only 210 MB. If you take a while and think about it, you will realize 300 MB are used only by the OS itself. In conclusion, the bad news is that you will have available only 256 MB of RAM.

Another bad thing that we encountered was the Music app, was built so poorly that is impossible to turn off because the actually controls are integrated into the slide-down menu. Contact pages are organized in a better way than previous versions, the SMS app has a great drop-down preview, and the calendar and weather widgets are also looking nice. There is also a social network updater, specially created to update the status to Facebook, Twittter and Myspace at the same time.